11/16/2008

hotel life

So I'm staying in a quite nice hotel for a few days for this conference. There are a lot of things about how hotels are run that are of course excessive (new towels every day) but seem only like an exaggeration of my regular life -- I change the towels in our house every few days, so fresh ones every day is just stepping up the speed or scale of domestic practice. (And unfortunately this is not a "green" hotel that offers you the possibility of saving your used towels for another day, nor the hooks to hang them on even.)

But then there the little things that I think are supposed to signify luxury, but just seem strange. The folding over of the edge of the toilet paper. The two new bars of soap every single day (but at least they don't take away the used one, so I can just keep using it). And the weirdest one at this hotel is that each day when the room is made up, housekeeping pulls out two kleenexes from the box (concealed by a ceramic container, nice enough) and fluffs them into some kind of flower-like shape and tucks them into the edge of the tissue box. Like I want to use a tissue that someone else has put their hands all over?? Like I'm supposed to be too fancy to pull my own tissue out of the box? (And although writing it out here demonstrated to me that it is probably supposed to aspire to the aesthetics of a flower in a vase given the ceramic container around the tissue box, it's still a couple of kleenexes. It's not that impressive, not like some origami-style dinner napkin at a restaurant.) So every night when I want to blow my nose I remove the fluffed up ones and get a fresh one. My skeeviness about germs wins out over my environmentalism, especially while traveling. (Usually however I can use those to mop up toothpaste or spilled coffee or something. I find some sort of use for them, as I can't just throw them away.)